Starting Over (1979)

          James L. Brooks was at the apex of his spectacular run as a TV showrunner when he penned his first theatrical feature, Starting Over. Adapted from a novel by Dan Wakefield, the movie is shot through with the same funny/sad humanism Brooks brought to his award-winning TV shows—The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, etc.—so even though Starting Overfeatures a trio of brand-name actors and was helmed by A-lister Alan J. Pakula, the movie is primarily a showcase for Brooks’ sharp observations about human frailty. (Brooks and Pakula co-produced the picture.)

          Stepping way outside his comfort zone and scoring with a charming performance, Burt Reynolds plays Phil Potter, a magazine writer who is abruptly dumped by his wife, Jessica (Candice Bergen), a beautiful narcissist embarking on a new career as a singer-songwriter. Suddenly thrown back into the dating scene, Phil takes solace in the company of his amiable brother, Mickey (Charles Durning), a touchy-feely psychiatrist. Mickey introduces Phil to divorced schoolteacher Marilyn Holmberg (Jill Clayburgh)—this happens during a funny scene involving mistaken identities and foul language—and they become a couple after a few false starts. However, their second-time-around romance is complicated when Jessica decides she wants Phil back.

          Sensitively examining the complexities of relationships during an era of shifting gender roles, Starting Overis smart and touching, with likeable people riding the amusing currents of confusing situations. Brooks’ dialogue is incisive, and his ability to shift the tone of a scene from ominous to promising and back again is spectacular; although Starting Over is one of Brooks’ lightest efforts, essentially just a romantic comedy made with exemplary skill, the movie is filled with insights and wit.

          It’s also filled with great acting. Reynolds ditches his usual macho swagger to play an everyman trying to find his way through life without hurting anyone—thereby ensuring he causes lots of inadvertent damage—while his female counterparts play to their respective strengths. Bergen revels in humiliating herself for the sake of a joke, especially when giving cringe-inducing performances of her character’s songs, and Clayburgh takes neuroticism to a Woody Allen-esque extreme. The women also create distinctly different personas, so it’s easy to see why Phil’s torn. Durning makes a great foil for Reynolds, and supporting players Frances Sternhagen, Mary Kay Place, and Austin Pendelton enliven minor roles.

Starting Over: GROOVY

Gable and Lombard (1976)

          Gable and Lombard, a romantic drama about the illicit love affair and subsequent marriage of real-life Golden Age movie stars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, is so preposterously fictionalized that it’s a pointless endeavor. Among many other howlers, the movie features a climactic scene in which Lombard (Jill Clayburgh) testifies on behalf of Gable (James Brolin) at a court hearing related to his divorce from the woman to whom he was married when he began keeping company with Lombard. Not only did this testimony never happen, but the filmmakers portray Lombard as such a crude loudmouth that when asked to describe her relationship with Gable, she proclaims, “Me and that big ape over there have been hitting the sack every night, and I’ve got a sore back to prove it!” Yet Gable and Lombard lacks the courage of its convictions—instead of going wholeheartedly down the road of tabloid tawdriness, the movie is meant to be some sort of loving tribute to once-in-a-lifetime passion. Unfortunately, Barry Sandler’s inept screenplay and Sidney J. Furie’s unsophisticated direction makes the leading characters look like sex-crazed buffoons instead of incandescent lovers.

          This tone-deaf portrayal is exacerbated by performances that are, to say the least, uneven. While Clayburgh is grandiose and shrill, it’s possible to discern some of the emotional realities she’s attempting to communicate. However, Brolin is laughable, growling and smirking through a paper-thin impersonation of Gable’s most obvious onscreen tics. When these dissonant performances merge during interminable dialogue scenes—Gable and Lombard runs a deadly 131 minutes—the result is loud, superficial nonsense. It’s also impossible to know whom this movie was meant to please: The picture’s narrative is far too bogus to please diehard Gable-Lombard fans, and far too cliché-ridden to work as a standalone romance. Yes, the movie is handsomely produced, but so what? Even the supposed appeal of re-creating Old Hollywood is wasted, since the only other major character drawn from history is studio chief L.B. Mayer (played unpersuasively by Allen Garfield). As the real Lombard’s onetime secretary told syndicated columnist Dick Kleiner at the time of the Gable and Lombard’s release: “I couldn’t associate a single scene with anything that I’d lived through. Nothing in it is right, not even the clothes.”

Gable and Lombard: LAME